Crossers

by Philip Caputo

  “We got us a real badass out here somewheres,” Blaine answered. “If my old A-team was with us, I’d still carry this piece. I don’t rely on nobody to take care of me. I take care of me.”

  If they hadn’t been on a search for dead bodies, Castle could have believed they were riding for pleasure on a fine winter afternoon, the high desert air so pure it seemed as if there were no atmosphere at all. The snow-rimmed Huachucas were bright in the sun, a light breeze was blowing, and white clouds drifted like a fleet of blimps over the mountains and past a real tethered blimp floating above the Fort Huachuca army base. It was, he’d heard, loaded with surveillance cameras and all manner of high-tech electronics, its purpose to detect planes flying drugs into the United States.

  They rode over the ridge. Castle directed them to the manzanita thicket. Morales and Gerardo dismounted, studied the ground, and set off across the arroyo, leading their horses. They walked along at a normal pace, barely pausing. Whatever sign they were reading, it was all Sanskrit to Castle. It was in fact invisible. He could see nothing but grass and rock and scrub.

  “As another pair of eyes, I’m not much good,” he murmured to Blaine, riding beside him.

  “Look there.” Blaine pointed ahead. “That line of bent grass? It’s bent in the opposite direction to the grass around it. That’s where he was walkin’. It’s his breadcrumbs.”

  Castle strained to see the breadcrumbs, but they remained hidden. Morales and Gerardo followed them north for a distance, then west, then east, then north again. Alone and terrified in the moonless dark, Miguel had gone in circles. The meandering route led to another arroyo, paved with red and brown boulders. Morales squatted, examined the rocks, then walked up and down the arroyo. He’d lost the track. Gerardo, making his own survey, stopped by a huge boulder and called out, “Oye, John. Ven aquí.” He gestured at the boulder’s surface and at a smaller rock lying beside it. He and the Navaho conversed for a while in Spanish, motioning downstream, or what would have been downstream if water had been running.

  “That little rock got knocked off the big one, that’s what Gerardo’s sayin’,” Blaine explained before Castle asked. “The small one is red, got a lot of iron oxide in it. If it had been kicked off a while back, the stain it left on the big one would have been faded by now, but it ain’t. So whatever knocked it off, two legs or four, did it in the last couple of days.”

  Morales and Gerardo made their way slowly down the arroyo, eyes lowered. When they stopped some thirty yards away, Gerardo summoned Blaine and Castle with a wave of his arm. They rode to where the two other men stood on a slab of slanting rock, its base powdered with sand. In the sand, clear as a plaster cast, was the print of a tennis shoe with a diamond tread.

  “Did I tell you Gerardo can track a lost cow over bare rock or what?” Blaine crowed. “Now ain’t you glad we came along?”

  “Blaine, your company alone makes it all worthwhile,” Morales quipped.

  He and Gerardo remounted. Because the lower arroyo was mostly pulverized gravel, it was easy to track from horseback, almost as easy as tracking in snow. At a point where the arroyo plunged some twenty feet down a sheer rock wall, the footprints turned off onto a stock trail that wandered through a dense oak and juniper forest. Mexican jays flitted through the trees, making harsh cries. Knotty branches scraped the riders’ faces, and on the ground prickly pear spread oval stems bristling with barbed spines. Finally the stock trail came out onto a road with a broad wash beyond it and low hills beyond the wash.

  “Juniper Canyon.” Blaine flashed a satisfied grin that his guess had proved right. “Straight-line distance, we ain’t three miles from where we started.”

  Miguel’s footprints led up the road. Morales could tell, by their depth and the length of the stride, that he’d been running. There were several old tire tracks in the reddish beige dust. One pair, deep corrugated treads spaced more narrowly than a car’s or truck’s, was new. It had been made by an ATV.

  As they rode around a bend, the horses threw their noses into the air, snorted, and danced nervous little jigs.

  “Must be right close,” Morales said. “Nothing like the smell of a corpse to give a horse the fits.”

  They dismounted and led the horses into the woods and hitched them to the stout branch of an old black oak, then went up the road on foot, following Miguel’s prints and the four-wheeler’s ruts. Morales held up when he came to a break in the ATV’s track.

  “The driver stopped the vehicle here, and those must be his. He was wearing hiking boots.” Morales pointed at footprints with a zigzag pattern to the soles that led a few feet into the sandy wash, choked with willows and the gray-green whisks of Apache broom. Then, walking a little farther, Morales declared, “Well, we’ve got us a homicide, sure enough.” Ten yards away was the first body—Reynaldo’s, Castle assumed, because Miguel said he’d been shot in the head, and there was a dime-size hole above one eye. A great amount of blood, all his body had held, had pumped out the much larger hole in the back of his skull, leaving a rust-colored stain in the ground. Héctor’s corpse lay behind Reynaldo’s and a few yards off to its right. He was on his side, and with his head pillowed on one hand, he could have been mistaken for a man taking a nap were it not for the two ragged exit wounds, one in the back of his shoulder, the other in the chest. The bodies had been in a deep freeze overnight, but now, as they thawed, the men picked up the smell that had spooked the horses, an odor something like rotting garbage.

  Castle stood, staring at the corpses with morbid fascination, reminded once again of his sheltered life. Soon to be fifty-six years old, he never had seen dead men before, much less men who had died violently. He had even been spared from the sight of his father’s body; he hadn’t been at the hospital when Dr. Castle expired at two o’clock in the morning, and because that once-handsome, vigorous man had been ravaged by his cancer, his mother had insisted on a closed coffin at the visitation.

  “You boys stay put,” the older deputy, the sergeant, commanded. “Too many people walking around will contaminate the crime scene.”

  Taking care where they stepped to avoid erasing any part of whatever story was written in the earth, he and the rookie searched for shell casings from the killer’s gun but did not find any.

  “Probably used a revolver,” the sergeant said. “If it was a semiauto, the dude policed up his brass, left as little evidence as possible.”

  A short distance from Héctor’s body, hidden by a clump of broom, the two policemen found the brush pile in which Miguel said he and his friends had cached the marijuana. It appeared to have been kicked apart, and a few fragments of burlap hung from the tangled branches.

  Morales in the meantime moved deeper into the wash, scaring up a jackrabbit as he vanished into the willow thickets. He returned about fifteen minutes later.

  “Everything I’ve seen so far pretty much confirms Miguel’s story. He took a dump over on the other side, like he said. He laid down over there for quite a while—the grass is flattened, like a deer bed. And then he came back to see what happened to his compañeros.” Morales paused, gazing thoughtfully. “That’s what I love about tracking. Sign doesn’t commit perjury. You know how to read it, it’s a truth-teller every time.”

  “So what truth is it tellin’?” asked Blaine.

  Morales dropped to one knee and drew a diagram in the dirt with a forefinger. “The one guy, the guy shot twice …”

  “That would be Héctor,” Blaine said. “Other one is Reynaldo.”

  “Héctor is laying down over here,” Morales continued. “He hears the ATV, goes to the edge of the road and flags it down. The driver gets off. Him and Héctor are standing almost face-to-face by the vehicle. Then Héctor walks a ways back into the wash to where the dope is stashed. The driver follows him a couple of yards but stops right here”—he makes another mark with his finger—“maybe ten or twelve feet from Héctor. Reynaldo is over here, off to Héctor’s left. Okay, Miguel says he saw Reynaldo drop
first. A well-aimed shot to the head. Reynaldo’s dead before he hits the ground. Then the killer pivots to cap Héctor—you can see where he did, there’s a kind of arc-shaped mark where he turned his feet. Héctor’s turned and started to run. The first round hits him square in the back, comes out his chest. I’m no ballistics expert, but I’d guess the impact spun him around, and the next round catches him in the upper chest and comes out his shoulder. That’s page one of the story.”

  “Page two bein’ what?”

  “Then the killer goes looking for Miguel.”

  “The sign tells you that?”

  “I found prints matching his out in the wash. He was moving back and forth like he was looking for something or someone, and my money would be on someone. See what I’m saying?”

  “He knew there was three of them.”

  “Right. So he doesn’t find Miguel. He can’t keep up the search. He’s just killed a couple of people. So he pulls the brush apart and snatches the merca. Drags the bales to the ATV—the drag marks are plain as day—loads up, and takes off—fast. You look at the tire treads, you see where the wheels spun and the vehicle swerved when he punched the gas. There it is, there’s the story.”

  Blaine squinted at him, chicken claws forming at the corners of his eyes. “But there’s a whole lot don’t make sense. You’re sayin’ some guy just happens to be drivin’ by on his four-wheeler, just happens to be carryin’ a gun, just happens to run into those old boys, just happens to know they’ve got a load of dope hidden in them rocks, then holes them both and rips the stuff off? That’s about three too many coincidences for me to swallow.”

  Morales stood and ran his fingers around the brim of his hat. “Blaine! The perp didn’t just happen to run into them. He had to be the guy who was supposed to take delivery. He probably didn’t know about what went down on the other side, so when his mules didn’t show, he must’ve figured they were ripping him off and went looking for them. Maybe it was just blind luck that he did find them, or maybe he had some tracking skills and picked up their trail. How did he know where they’d stashed the dope? He asked them, and Héctor and Reynaldo, figuring this was their guy, told him. Sí, señor, tenemos la merca, and there it is, under that brush.”

  “So why kill them if they was bein’ so cooperative?”

  “I’m a tracker. I know what the ground tells me happened or probably happened. Why it happened and motive and all that shit, that’s for the sheriff. I don’t investigate crimes.”

  “But hell, you got to have a good guess to make it add up.”

  “Maybe the plan was to kill them all along.”

  Blaine scuffed the ground with a boot. “John, the drug boss what sent those three sad sacks over the line with all that merchandise got to have an IQ not much bigger than my hat size.”

  “Been done before, turning migrants into mules to pay their way. Those three, they were just backs to put the stuff on.”

  The sergeant and his partner used their VHF radio to summon a team of investigators.

  “Could be a while before they get here,” the sergeant added. “But you boys stick around. They might have a few questions for you. You in particular, sir,” he said, looking at Castle. “You found the only eyewitness, and that’s what got this pretty little ball rolling.”

  They returned to where the horses were tied and sat in the shade. Castle wanted nothing more than to go back to his cabin, to his dog and his Seneca. It gladdened his heart to know that he had rescued Miguel, but that simple act of mercy had somehow enmeshed him in something he wanted no part of. He pondered the chain of accidents that had led him to this point, beginning with his decision, made for no special reason, to hunt close to home this morning. A chain of accidents, yes, but when he looked at it in its totality, it did not seem accidental; it had the quality of fate, as if the course of his life and Miguel’s were destined to meet. Break one link, and he would not be here with his cowboy cousin and a Navaho tracker and a Mexican vaquero and two dead strangers lying amid the willows and broom across a road in the desert.

  Blaine tapped a cigarette out of his pack and offered one to Morales, who shook his head. “Those things will kill you sure as a bullet.”

  “Not these.” Blaine held up the blue package with the face of an Indian in full headdress. “This here brand has got none of those additives and preservatives. It’s a healthy cigarette.”

  Morales snorted. “I like that. A healthy cigarette. Like healthy strychnine.”

  Blaine took a deep drag, tilted his head back, and exhaled a long plume of smoke. “There. I feel better already.” Gerardo rolled one of his own. He understood almost as little English as Castle did Spanish, but he seemed content to sit there smoking in silent detachment.

  “I was just thinkin’, John,” said Blaine abruptly, “that our granddad, mine and Gil’s, wouldn’t of put up with none of this shit. He was at one time a deputy sheriff of Santa Cruz County. Back in the twenties and thirties.”

  “Are you leading up to something or just passing time?”

  Blaine said, “He’d found out some son of a bitch killed two men on his land, he wouldn’t of called the law—”

  “Of course not,” Morales interrupted. “He was the law.”

  “Even when he wasn’t, is what I’m sayin’. He would of made it his business to find the son of a bitch, and when he did … I’ll tell you a story. This was back before he was a lawman, nineteen eighteen or around then. He was out checkin’ the range and caught this guy with a runnin’ iron and a San Ignacio calf with a piggin’ rope round its back legs. Ben got the old drop on him and got off his horse and cold-cocked him with a butt stroke of his saddle gun. He didn’t want to waste good rope tyin’ him up, so he got his cutters and snipped off some barbed wire from a fence nearby and wrapped it around the rustler’s wrists and ankles. Ben flung him over the horse and rode with him all the way to Patagonia, to the town marshal’s office, and dumped the guy right there. Marshal comes out, Ben says, ‘Caught this fella a-tryin’ to steal one of our calves. You don’t take care of him, I will.’” Blaine snubbed the cigarette in the dirt, then field-stripped it—an old habit from Vietnam. “Did your mama ever tell you that story, Gil?”

  “She hardly ever talked about him,” Castle said, a split-screen image in his mind: the Darien matron tending her garden on Scott’s Cove; her father cracking a rustler’s jaw with a rifle butt and tying him up with barbed wire. That such a woman had sprung from such a man seemed almost unnatural, as if parent and offspring belonged to two distinct species.

  “That’s the kind of man he was,” said Blaine, with reverence. “‘You don’t take care of him, I will.’”

  “Different times,” said Morales. “Nowadays the rustler would probably sue.”

  “They wasn’t much for lawsuits back then. But if Ben was alive today, count on it, the son of a bitch what shot those two sad sacks wouldn’t enjoy his newfound wealth for long.”

  “The dude with the IQ your hat size. Maybe he’s not so dumb after all.”

  “I don’t care if he’s Albert goddamn Einstein. I don’t want him and those other greaseballs usin’ my ranch as a highway for the poison they’re peddlin’, grass, coke, or heroin.” Blaine scooped up a handful of dirt and sifted it through his fingers. “Sung to the land,” he said in a quieter voice. “An Aussie commando I knew in Vietnam told me that’s what the aboriginal folks say about a place that’s a part of you so much, you’d die of bein’ away from it. Sung to the land. That’s how I feel about this ranch. I’ve always taken good care of it, and I intend to continue doin’ just that.”

  Morales clapped him on the shoulder. “Know the feeling. But we both know that this valley has been a drug corridor for twenty years.”

  “Yeah. But this here shootin’ puts things on a different level.” Blaine paused and watched a harrier soar over the wash. “I’ve got a near-eighty-year-old mother to think about. Feisty as all hell and probably in better shape than me, but she is lookin’
at eighty.”

  The sound of approaching cars intruded. In a moment a small convoy came jouncing down the road—two SUVs from the sheriff’s department and an ambulance with its roof lights flashing but its siren off. One of the cars swung off sideways to block the road. A patrolman climbed out and immediately began to rope off the area with yellow tape stamped with black lettering, KEEP OUT—CRIME SCENE, though it was unlikely anyone would come tramping through this remote area. Two plainclothesmen emerged from the second car, and while one—a homicide detective who gave his name as Lieutenant Soto—questioned Castle, Blaine, and Gerardo. Morales led the other, carrying a camera and a black briefcase, to the bodies. He photographed them from different angles, then took pictures of the four-wheeler’s tire marks and the footprints. When he was finished, he signaled the EMTs, who pulled out a stretcher and body bags from the ambulance and went up the wash to collect Héctor and Reynaldo. All this investigative activity had a degree of unreality—it looked like a scene from a cop show—but those were real corpses being placed into the body bags. How would their families be located? Castle asked himself. Who would notify them, new citizens in the nation of grief? He could almost hear the lamentations that would rise from obscure villages in Mexico, and those but a few voices in the vast chorus of mourning singing even now in homes in America, in Afghanistan, in a thousand other places. If you could broadcast the groans and shrieks and howls of a single day, the sound would deafen the world.

  Morales returned. “We’re done. The rest is up to them,” he said, jerking his head at the detectives as they poked through the brush.

  “What do you think?” asked Blaine. “I mean the chances they’ll catch the guy?”

  Morales glanced at the EMTs, shoving one of the bodies into the ambulance. “Two more dead drug mules? Don’t think this will be on the sheriff’s A-list.”